Keeping Halloween fun and tasteful is as simple as a conversation with your friends
Halloween is a sacred holiday for many. As children, many students can remember dressing up as their favorite characters and monsters from television, movies, books and pop culture, and binging their favorite candies until they passed out. College students and adults now celebrate Halloween by partying with their friends… until they pass out.
Dressing up is arguably the most creative, self-expressive and fun part of Halloween. It is a time where you get to express a part of yourself that isn’t necessarily appropriate for work or school, and you get to show off your god-like skills with a sewing machine (or your god-like skills at using Google Maps to find the nearest Spirit Halloween).
Amidst all of the fun and candy, a few party poopers can spoil all of the fun with offensive or culturally appropriated costumes that sour the joy for literally everyone else. Despite the backlash and consequences that people receive for their misguided costumes, we still see them every year.
As we wrap up the Halloween season, it is important to take a moment to reflect on how we as a community should police the costumes that people wear for Halloween. While part of the charm of Halloween is the creativity and individuality of costumes, people who go out of their way to be offensive with their costumes should feel some sort of social consequences for purposefully ruining everybody’s night.
SUNY Geneseo is committed to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, which is a very fancy way of saying that Geneseo is committed to making the environment on campus safe and comfortable for students in marginalized groups such as the BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities.
SUNY Geneseo regularly has conversations about racism and homophobia through the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, including conversations about how the people from these communities are portrayed. As members of the Geneseo community, it is our responsibility to preserve the safety and comfort of this community for all students, especially students who in the past, have been made to feel unsafe or uncomfortable.
Starting a fight on Court St. with someone wearing blackface doesn’t resolve the situation, and all anybody really accomplishes is ruining even more peoples’ day and getting a wicked nosebleed. I can say from experience, wicked nosebleeds do not photograph well, but if it improves the aesthetic of your Halloween costume, you do you.
By angrily attacking a person, you put that person on the defensive, which amounts to lots of yelling and very little talking. A better response might be a respectful and informed conversation.
That being said, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and in 2021, it can be hard to tell or predict what might be offensive. And like I said, bloody noses do not photograph well, so wanting to be a little extra cautious on one of the biggest nights of the year is only good common sense.
Good news, scholars—there is a way to assess the offensiveness or racism of your costume before it makes it off the drawing board. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst created a flow chart to help students determine if their costumes were racist.
It is called the Simple Costume Racism Evaluation and Assessment Meter, or S.C.R.E.A.M., which is very on-message for Halloween. The chart asks a series of questions and directs you to other questions based on your answer. When you finish the line of questioning, it gives you a risk assessment level, ranging from low, guarded, elevated, and severe.
The S.C.R.E.A.M. chart is easy to follow, simple, and accessible via internet, so there’s no excuse not to use it. Why make the learning and living environment on campus feel uncomfortable and unsafe for students from marginalized groups when you have a free guide on how to not do that?
That being said, some people insist on acting like children, purposely pushing boundaries that exist to protect BIPOC students, and honestly, any student from any minority. Behavior like that is childish, immature, and clearly does not reflect college-level thinking. Perhaps Geneseo should offer a “Repeat Kindergarten” course.
Proper education and guidance can and does prevent offensive costumes from making it off the drawing board. But, even after being told that their costumes are offensive or hurtful, some people still insist on being purposely belligerent.
If you show this person where their costume scores on the S.C.R.E.A.M. chart, the impact their costume has on marginalized groups, and they still won’t switch it up, just remind them that everyone will see them for the rude, insensitive, and all-around trashy person they are.
